What order to texture a 3d object?
I've been through your frustration - thought a step by step 'walk- through' might also help...


Texturing for Newbies -


Start up Blender with the default cube.

Select it with RMB. (Right mouse button)

at the right there is a horizontal line of icons. (If not press SHIFT-SPACE)

Select the little cube icon to confirm you've selected the cube in the 3D window.

Move further right to the little brown ball icon. (material properties)

Select that and press the "New" button.  That will create a material slot for the cube which will be given the default slot name "Material" strangely enough.  You can rename this if desired.

Move one top icon to the right select that. Its a tiny little checkered square.

(and this is where the story really starts!)

Press the "New" button below and that to create a texture slot for the 'Material' slot you created just prior.  By an amzing coincidence this slot is given the title "Texture".  You can rename that too if you're so inclined.

Immediately under the new title you can see that it's defaulted to 
"Image or Movie"

Scroll down and open the tab called "Image".  It's probably open already by default.

Click on "Open" and select an image file in your machine.

Chances are nothing is going to be seen straight off, but the image should appear up top where you created the slot.

Close the image tab for now.  You don't want too much clutter.

Go down further and open the "Mapping" tab.  It's probably open already.

For a security blanket, select "Generated" instead of the default UV option so you can see your image appearing correctly on the top and bottom of the cube.  The sides however will probably be just coloured lines.

This is because we need to map the image for each and every side of the cube.

Change the "Generated" option back to "UV".

At the top right of the 3D window, drag down a new window, which should be a duplicate of the 3D view.

Go to the lower one one and expand it's icon at bottom left, select -
"UV Image Editor".

At the UV editor's lower border, expand the menus at left-of-center and select your image.  It might be the only one listed.  When you select this, it will appear large as life in the editor.

Place your mouse cursor back in the 3D window and with the cube still selected, get into "Edit" mode. (TAB)

In Edit mode press CTL-TAB and select "Face".  All faces should be highlited.  If they're not, press A.

At the bottom border of the window click on "Mesh", then "UV Unwrap", then "UV unwrap" a second time.

Presto!!!  Your texture should appear at all sides of the cube!



When a contiguous texture is required, you could try "Smart Unwrapping"
and in fact experiment with all the unwrap options.  For now stick to what you've got.

Reflective light called 'Specular' can upset texturing at times, so try turning this off or reducing it to see the effect,  Get back to the top icons, select the Material icon again. (little brown ball)

Just below the diffuse slot is the "Specular" one.  Drag it's slider back to zero for now.

Under the "shading" tab just below that, click on the "Shadeless" box.  That can brighten up surfaces markedly.

-=========-

It could be that the images are all topsy turvy, however each of the cube's surface images can be adjusted and rotated from the UV editor without affecting the cube's geometry itself.

From the 3D window, make sure you're still in edit mode and select a single face.  Go to the UV editor's lower border and two icons on from the "View" option is an icon that when highlited, will keep the 3D window's surface selections in synch with those highlited in the UV editor, and vice versa.  Click on that to highlite.

The image in the editor should also glow.  That's the surface that's going to be affected by what you do next.

Place the cursor in the UV editor and press R.  Drag the image around to the desired angle.  Typing R90 will (would you believe?) rotate the image 90 degrees, R180, 180 degrees.

You'll notice that the UV editor works in 2D.  X &amp; Y axis only.

You can also scale images by pressing S and move the mouse without dragging.

SX, SY will scale surfaces in the X or Y axis respectively.  Make sure you're in the UV editor each time!!!

GX and GY will "Grab" an image and drag ts in those axis also.  Just pressing G will drag it around as you like.


and that I hope, will get you going -